Tag Archive | science

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blue marble,” “a blue pale dot,” or, as Chaucer described it, “this litel spot of erthe,” the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

I’m a gardener, and spent years studying chemistry so this subject interests me. Therefore I am going to inflict it on you.

Chemicals are scary if you don’t understand them, and people especially get worried by the ones we use regularly on food plants and in horticulture, pesticides and herbicides. I want to concentrate on just one, Glyphosate; it is used in 750 different products worldwide and is the most popular herbicide in the world [1]. It’s a broad spectrum herbicide used in domestic, agricultural and forestry settings and by every council in the country to keep the paths tidy and cut the lines in to football and cricket pitches (except in Bristol, where they’ve experimented with vinegar after a successful campaign by local campaigners to ban the use of glyphosate there by the council).